FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMPS - PAGE 3

Photographer Jeffrey Wolin began photographing Chicago area Holocaust survivors two years ago, before the movie "Schindler's List" and the opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., riveted national attention. But unlike the movie and the museum, Wolin's portraits introduce survivors as they are living their lives today, and that's what makes the work so powerful. The portraits show people in the safe haven of their homes; their horrific memories of brutality are handwritten directly on the photographs.

The United Nations General Assembly, for the first time in its history, devoted a daylong special session Monday solely to the Holocaust and provided space in its headquarters lobby for an exhibit commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. Speaker after speaker, including Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and foreign ministers from Israel and European countries delivered eloquent addresses about intolerance and genocide, but all spoke to a chamber with a notable number of empty seats.

Our troubled century has given us numerous examples of art created out of the detritus of war -- some of it bound to the time and place of its creation, some of it more durable, providing us with shattering testimony to the events that inspired it. Viktor Ullmann's "The Emperor of Atlantis" ("Der Kaiser von Atlantis"), written in a Nazi concentration camp, is an example of the latter type. Not the least of its ironies is that it's a chamber opera about death written in the shadow of death--at once a musical allegory, a courageous act of defiance and a savage indictment of fascism.

William P. Levine was an Army intelligence officer who was among the first Allied troops to arrive at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany as World War II was ending. He entered Dachau on April 29, 1945, encountering starving, frightened survivors alongside dead bodies strewn everywhere, said his wife, Rhoda. The memories were so painful that Mr. Levine, who was one of the Army's higher-ranking Jewish officers, couldn't bring himself to share them with anyone for almost four decades after the war. "He used to say it was for self-preservation - that it was easier to forget it," his wife said.

On the eve of World War II, Eleanore C. Glass made a desperate trip to Berlin in a bid to win freedom for her husband, a Jew imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp. For reasons not entirely clear, her mission was successful, and Henry Glass was released. The couple left Europe for America, eventually settling in Chicago. Here, Glass gained renown as an industrial designer while Mrs. Glass raised a family, helped organize the social aspects of her husband's business and passed on the dressmaking skills she had learned in Vienna.

Investigators say Ford used slave labor: British investigators Wednesday named 11 companies, including Detroit-based Ford Motor Co., that used slave labor from Nazi concentration camps in World War II and said the release reflected a new focus with broad implications requiring compensation of survivors. About a million Jews died as a result of slave labor. There were 7.7 million non-Jewish slave laborers under Nazi control in late 1944.

The UN said Tuesday that it would hold a special session of the General Assembly on Jan. 24 to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, the first time it has officially commemorated the event. Stephane Dujarric, a spokesman for Secretary General Kofi Annan, said the UN had never held such a high-level remembrance of the Holocaust. The announcement came after a majority of the UN's members responded favorably to a poll in a letter from Annan.

The Justice Department asked an immigration judge on Friday to deport an Ohio man the government says was a guard at Nazi concentration camps. John Demjanjuk, 84, of Seven Hills, Ohio, is a retired auto worker who the government says served during World War II as an armed guard at Nazi extermination and concentration camps. In April, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed a lower court decision revoking Demjanjuk's U.S. citizenship on several grounds, including his "willing" service in an SS-run unit "dedicated to exploiting and exterminating" Jewish civilians in Nazi-occupied Poland.

The Justice Department asked an immigration judge Friday to deport an Ohioan the government says was a guard at Nazi concentration camps. John Demjanjuk, 84, of Seven Hills, Ohio, is a retired autoworker. In April, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed a lower court decision revoking Demjanjuk's citizenship, citing his "willing" service in an SS-run unit "dedicated to exploiting and exterminating" Jewish civilians in Nazi-occupied Poland. Demjanjuk was deported to Israel in 1986, where he was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to hang.